To the Bird I Killed on Election Day
He became inside a feather-burst,
then fell into my velocity:
I have not been able to name this bird since 4th grade.
His name evaporated with the names for clouds.
one leg bent into the grill.
I unknowingly carry him with me to the library.
I have not voted for 10 years.
I do not know these judges.
Let them all stand down.
Someone is typing Illuminati backwards:
it takes them to the web site for the NSA.
They believe this means something.
Anyone can purchase a domain.
Anyone can love like a populist.
Anyone can re-route to any existing site.
Your full name backwards could be porn tomorrow.
Your license plate, a behind-the-scenes look
at the mansion from that Taylor Swift video.
Your social security number could be James Franco shrugging.
I owe this library 65 dollars.
I am very bad at returning.
Minutes after voting, I am slowly lifting him
out of the grill with a small branch.
His leg bent forward, his impossibly heavy head
agreeing with the wood.
Job linked the soaring of hawks to wisdom.
I once held your baby like an impossible thunder.
I once held your baby like dripping hyperbole.
I once held your baby like a treaty signed in the dark.
I once held your baby like it was 1993.
Love is for the Birds
In 1957, Loren Eiseley looked up at two pigeons making love
at the top of a New York sky-rise,
thrusting into air, falling from the force of wind under a lovers wings. They would fall,
then slowly remember themselves, recover, and return to the edge. He wrote,
There was but the sun and the eye from the first. He wrote,
Use this for start of nature book. He wrote,
Diary of a Suicide Year. You were there, at the top of that sky-rise,
typing copy about a youth cream that would wash away the years.
Somewhere you are playing Bubble Bobble with a new lover,
blowing bubbles as a little blue dinosaur. You are always the blue one, and he is
the green one. He is so much better at blowing bubbles, at bouncing up,
one bubble at a time. Like a kind of flying, bouncing— sometimes you bounce
so high, out of frame. Sometimes you think you are the green one, and you follow
his every move. Sometimes you do not move at all, your bubbles
breaking before you can jump.
Centuries ago, in Athens, you took five raven’s eggs, like David’s stones,
impossible small life in your open palm. You raised the eggs above your head,
as if to the sun, an offering of sorts, a kind of flying, then pressed them
against your peppered hair until they broke. An inky almost
seeped through your hair, down past roots, through bone, until they
stopped at the tip of your teeth. There is chaos in being unborn. A black-tooth scream
that flies through a city.
You read somewhere there were no brontosauruses, that
Land Before Time got it wrong. You read raptors had bright blue feathers, that
Jurassic Park was a lie. You read that five couples became engaged this past Sunday.
You always said you could tell which ones would not stay together: the ones
with raven-black hair, the ones with too much ledge, the ones
with closed-lipped smiles.
David Rawson is the author of A Jellyfish for Every Name and Proximity, both available from ELJ Publications.
